Firefox 157 will include JPEG XL by default on all platforms
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Firefox 157 will ship JPEG XL decoding enabled by default on all platforms.
Timothy Nikkel announced intent to ship JPEG XL in Firefox 157 on all platforms. The Rust decoder jxl-rs enables decoding behind the pref image.jxl.enabled, currently on by default on Nightly. Performance concerns were addressed with jxl-rs 0.6.0's multithreaded decoding; benchmarks showed it slightly ahead of Safari's C++ libjxl. Features include animation, progressive display, and HDR tone mapping. Safari shipped JPEG XL in 17.0; Chrome has it behind a flag using the same Rust library but no intent to ship yet.
What commenters are saying
Many commenters explained JPEG XL's appeal: lossless JPEG recompression (20-30% savings without re-encoding), better progressive decoding than AVIF, support for >16K pixel dimensions, and strong lossless compression. One commenter raised a concrete performance concern: lossless JXL decoding was measured as 30x slower than lossless WebP, suggesting shipping only lossy JXL initially. Others noted JXL's encoding speed advantage and broader feature set (HDR, extra channels). The thread split between proponents of JXL's technical merits and skeptics citing marginal bandwidth improvements and slower decoding.